


Darkness seized

by elephant_eyelash



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Multiple chapters, Stupid flowery prose, Trigger warning: abuse, Trigger warning: imprisonment, Trigger warning: mentions of rape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-05 12:04:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 9,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elephant_eyelash/pseuds/elephant_eyelash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A messy, overly long Arya and Gendry future-fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART I: Chapter one

**Author's Note:**

> This work has been a long time in the making. I've taken every measure to try and make it as believable as possible, but mistakes and differences in interpretation are bound to arise at some point. This is, above all, my interpretation of Arya and Gendry's future selves as opposed to a strict canonical adherence to their characters at the end of DwD. In my story, Arya is fourteen and Gendry nineteen (yeah, I changed it, but as far as I know this is the biggest change I've implemented).
> 
> Also, as I've never written multi-chaptered narrative before, the chapters tend to vary in length- for this reason each chapter on here has two or three smaller POV chapters.
> 
> Individual major trigger warnings will be put at the start of each chapter. 
> 
> I'd like to primarily dedicate this to Kavi, my wonderful beta. Also to Glênis, a better writer for this pairing than I could ever imagine being. To Rebecka, the first girl I fangirled about them with. And importantly to Sarah, who again writes these two with more sensitivity and creativity than I ever could, but has still been a constant source of support and love to me.

**PART I  
THE RESURRECTION**

  
**Chapter one**

**TW:** Imprisonment, death, abuse

**  
**

[Arya]

  
The wind felt its way through her thighs. Her foot edged on the precipice of the cliff, Nymeria beside her. They both became one, one with the forest. She could smell the scent of pines and the wet, dirty earth. Winter is coming, Winter is here. Arya stark is fourteen years old. She has killed many men. in the inlet of her left thigh a slice for each last breath, a reminder of the tally she owed the God of Death. Nymeria circles, sniffing the odours of the city: cheap meat and skin on skin, the smell of extinguished flames. Arya smells it too. She smells death, the tang of Ned Stark's blood on the ground.  
  
Some men from the forest have started to bring back stories-- the Ghost of Winterfell, a vengeful spirit clad in wolf-furs, quick and silent, with eyes like flint and a wolf by her side. Red bloody mouth and sharp claws. But it is the ghost girl who truly scares them-- the mask she wears.

She has learnt to live like a wolf. She drinks from icy rivers, she runs and leaps through the trees. She listens to the murmurs of the Old Gods in the wind. Her meat she takes raw, even if it makes her feel ill: fire is too dangerous. Instead nymeria and the wolves keep her warm. She forgets her name. Ghosts have no names, no use for them. I am death. I am the final flash in cersei's lannister's eyes.  
  
She fingers her dagger; Nymeria's old tooth. She feels the inlets and patterns of the bone; sharp as any sword; as it hangs around her neck. In the moonlight it glows like pearl.

 

[Gendry]

  
Gendry awoke to the sound of the peeling bell and horses on snow. He knew the sounds, had begun to realise that the same shift in the wind that would always occur when she was near. He wondered if it was the Lord of Light warning him of her arrival. He could hear the cries and calls of the orphans outside, some frightened, some excited. Grunting, he slipped on his clothes and moth-eaten furs and went to meet them outside.  
  
Winter in the Riverlands was all ice, freezing rain and sleet and fog, but to hear the men who passed through it was still preferable to the North. And still the war raged. An old, old ghost of a war now, but its fires still spread wherever they could find.  
  
Every day more Faith Militant passed through on their way to the North, to suck out the scourge of the Red God and the Old Gods, to carve new idols from the bone-white Weirwoods and anoint them with the blood of heretics. A few times they came in demanding food, shelter, and Gendry obliged them. They were flanked by men in brilliant armour, septons, beggars, skinny women with bawling babies and sang songs of the Mother through the night. Gendry shut his eyes and prayed to R'Hllor for the war to end.  
  
The ice crunched beneath his feet outside. He spotted Harwin, Lem...and her. Gendry numbly wondered which one this was, which number. In the distance he could hear Jenye hushing the children to get inside.  
  
Lem threw the corpse on the ground, spat on it. Across the man's neck a line as faint as red thread.  
  
"Stoke the fires, boy." Beardless Dick said. "And get that woman of yours' to heat us some broth."  
  
"She's not my woman." Gendry said, sniffing. Well, not really, though they had lain together a few times.  
  
The cold had made the man's skin grey. Gendry picked up the frozen corpse after he ripped off his clothes for rags, tossed it in the ditch they used for their sacred fires, and began to gather the little dry kindling they had. The men all disappeared inside, mumbling about beer and hungry bellies. Only the Lady and Thoros remained, who watched sadly as Gendry lit the first spark.  
  
"The Lord of Light condemn him." Thoros murmured.  
  
Lady Stoneheart said nothing, simply watched the flames begin to yawn open, warming and then blackening the skin of the Frey. Gendry had stopped asking what their names were a while ago, and he wondered if any of them even knew, even cared anyway. A Frey was a Frey. And a Frey was an enemy. Gendry watched as the flames ripped the nose from his face, melting him to bone, and his eyes burst open with a quiet pop. After it had cooled Jeyne would grind the bones for the pigs.  
  
"Take me to her." Lady Stoneheart said to him. Gendry looked to the floor, hesitated for the briefest of moments, and then made his way to the cellar. Thoros and the Lady followed. Soon the smell of wine tangled in with the sweet tang of urine, and in the distance chains rattled softly.  
  
The woman shielded her eyes from the light at first. Then she began crying.  
  
"Renly, oh Renly." She sobbed. "Renly, you've come. I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead."  
  
Something cold and sick settled at the bottom of Gendry's stomach, and he leans down to her, the torchlight casting her face in an ugly, half-shadowed mask. He had stopped correcting her a long time ago. Her eyes were wet with tears, and looked upon him like he was her God, her saviour, and that made him sicker than anything.  
  
"It's me." He said hoarsely. "It's me and the Lady. Your Lady. You remember her?"  
  
Brienne nodded, sniffling.  
  
He stepped back. Lady Stoneheart moved forward, her hands knotted together, and for a second Gendry saw the Lady she must have once been.  
  
"Where is Sansa?" She asked, the same way she always did.  
  
"I don't know." Brienne cried. She lifted her hands up feebly. "I don't know. I went looking for her. With Oathkeeper...And then Podrick, oh..." She crumpled over.  
  
"Where is Sansa?"  
  
"I don't know. I looked for so long. So long. And then Jaime..."

 

Eventually she stopped babbling, her chains tightening around her wrists as she brought her fists to hide her face.  
  
"Where is Sansa?"  
  
Brienne just sobbed. Gendry shut his eyes. The sound was so familiar now, like the sound of rain or fire.  
  
"No food for three days." Lady Stoneheart whispered to Gendry. "If she cries from thirst she'll drink vinegar."

Gendry squeezed his eyes shut. Brienne's cries became nothing more than a thin, brittle sound. By the time he had slammed the door shut she was nothing more than a whisper.


	2. Chapter two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: imprisonment, abuse

[Arya]  
  
She tracks Cersei's movements, a whirl of golden sunlight following her everywhere. Arya sticks her tongue against her teeth. Cersssssei- the 's' in snake. The fat king follows his Mother. Arya remembers the first kill-- the suckling pig stable boy. The king is just the same. Al a body is is layers of fat and muscle. Meat. Nymeria grows hungry.  
  
In this life she is Lyla, a kitchen girl wih sad small eyes and thin, bony fingers. Her muscles sink into folds of cloth. Cersei never even bothers to look her way. In the kitchen the steam stings her eyes. At night she sleeps and becomes Nymeria in the distant, humid caves, sucking the marrow of bones. And she can feel the wolf long for the tender bones of the Queen, to taste the bloody meat and feast. The bones will crack underneath her teeth. Arya smiles into her pillow.  
  
King's Llanding is the same as she remembers. She remembers Arya's time here, and the labyrinth becomes familiar once again. Syrio had taught her to stalk in shadows-- these had been her first shadows and they still fit her well.  
  
Cersei is older now. Her hair is shorter, drier. But she walks with the same gait, chin straight, eyes cold. She is still the thorned rose that Arya remembers.  
  
There is another girl. The real queen. She sits in the garden and reads. Ty-rell. Arya tries to remember the names, the history lessons, but they fail her. Arya had always hated those lessons and instead dreamt them away, listening to the whoosh of arrows through the air as her brothers practised archery and wishing, aching to be there instead.  
  
The girl's name doesn't matter. All that would matter is if she got in her way. And then she'd be dead and her name definitely wouldn't matter.  
  
She will trap her in fire, she thinks, along with Ilyn and the Mountain if she can find them. Choke them in flames. She imagines how the heat will feel on her skin, hot fingers crawling down the skin of her arms.

 

[Gendry]

  
Gendry notices the old man watching the flames of the hearth and Gendry realises he has spent most of his life by the fire. A hearth is the warmest place in the world. As a child he would watch the flames, rapt. Sometimes Tobho would throw a potato covered in clay into the fire, then he'd crack it open and he and Gendry would eat it with lots of salt and butter, and he'd feel so happy he'd be sure he'd burst. Sometimes he wonders about Tobho. he was the only father he had ever really known, but not really.  
  
"Seeing anything, old man?" He asks, trying to fight away the sad thoughts with noise, the same way he always did.  
  
Thoros chuckles. "Would you want to know if i had?"  
  
Gendry wipes the sweat off the bridge of his nose. "Not bothered either way."  
  
"I'm not sure you mean that, Ser Waters." He says the 'Ser' mockingly, because real knights don't sleep under thin blankets stolen off dead men and have smoke in their every pore.  
  
"Oh?"  
  
"Every man wants to know his destiny."  
  
"I know my destiny, priest." The hammer hits the steel, a molten snake. "And it's this. Hitting steel day in, day out till my bones grow brittle."  
  
He was no knight, he knew that now, not since-- No, let the steel sing its song. He tries to focus on the way his muscles flex and strain as he hits the steel again, to think of anything but his memories.  
   
Thoros grows silent. In the distance the inn murmurs with the sound of people. Gendry's brothers-in-arms. How long ago had they met? But they had been different then. Good men. Honourable men. Maybe this is why Thoros hides with a strange bastard boy who barely talks.  
  
"A stag." The old man rattles out suddenly. "In a Weirwood I do not know."  
  
Gendry dislikes the way the words crawl over his skin, the cold feeling in his blood now. "You've been drinking too much." Bang. The steel sings. A stag, it makes him feel strange. "And a forge is no place for a priest."  
  
He thinks of the last time he saw a weirwood, of the white circles against the grass. He had been with her then. They had played and her laughter filled the air. It had somehow become his happiest memory.  
  
"The priest belongs where he is needed." Thoros says. Gendry groans. He hates these shadowy words with no clear meaning: words that men with power use and twist and make strange. He was used to a world where words were always direct, sharp, as clear and as cold as steel.  
  
"What I need." Gendry says, no longer trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. "Is silence."  
  
He walked out into the cold, crisp air. The smell of flesh had finally gone. Inside the men spoke quietly around a small candle. Gendry opened the latch to the cellar door.  
  
Brienne was weaker than she had ever been, arms barely managing to support her iron cuffs. I forged those chains, Gendry thought, I forged those chains. He dug into his pocket, brought out a crust of bread, chewed it, and then fed her the mush. She swallowed. He gave her warm water, making sure some passed her cracked lips.  
  
"Just tell us where she is." He whispers. "Just tell us where Sansa is. What the Kingslayer did to her."  
  
"Nothing." She rasps. "Please, Renly, please."

 

He had already noticed a shadow at the door.  
  
"This is not what her Ladyship instructed." He said, recognising Lem's voice-- Lem who had once ruffled his hair, Lem who had once been kind.  
  
"She'll be dead if I followed her orders, and that way her Ladyship would never find out where her daughter is."  
  
"We still have the Kingslayer." Lem says. He looks to Brienne, at her soiled clothes and dead, sunken eyes and curls his nose. "It'd be kinder to end it for her."  
  
"...He still doesn't speak?" Gendry asked.  
  
"No, he doesn't. Stubborn bastard." Lem mumbled. He paused for a moment. "Her Ladyship wants us to go North, and she wants you to come with us."  
  
Gendry's head snaps up. "North?"  
  
"For her daughter. For Arya."  
  
Gendry swallows thickly, trying to keep the shake out of his voice. "It's true then. She definitely married the Bolton bastard."  
  
"Until Stannis brought her back to the Wall." Lem brushed a hand through his hair. "And we thought her long dead."  
  
Gendry was thankful for the way the darkness shielded his eyes, the pain that winced through his heart at the memory, the way he had beat his fists against the wall till they bled and screamed for her against the rain, because he had let her run, he had let her down.  
  
"We can't go, Gendry." Lem said.  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Look around you boy, Winter is here." Lem growled. "And the Boltons and Freys hold the entrance to the North. We'll be found, flayed, and killed."  
  
"You still haven't told her." Gendry realised.  
  
Lem narrows his eyes. "If she found out we had her daughter and let her escape she'd have us dead in a second. You have a death wish, boy?"  
  
"No, but returning her to her daughter is better than murdering Freys, Lem."  
  
 Lem smacked him square in the mouth. "Watch your tongue."  
  
Gendry cracked his jaw. He spat the blood on the ground. "I'll go with her, even if you lot don't."  
  
"Heh. Got your head full of romantic notions, boy." Lem said. "Knights aren't what they are in tales, lad. She don't need no rescuing. Don't think I don't remember how we had to try and stop you from running off when she escaped. You and Harwin both." He stepped forward, his voice becoming cruel. "Only you were lovesick."  
  
"She was a child." Gendry bit out. He had never thought of her like that. But he had made a quiet vow to try and keep her safe, the very moment they first exchanged secrets on the Kingsroad, what seemed like a lifetime ago. And he had failed her.  
  
"Aye, but she was a highborn Lady none the less." He tapped his temple. "And men like you, boy, men with bastard names and dead men's swords, they look at these highborn girls and feel their hearts stirring, and their heads get full of silly dreams that they're more than what they are. And it only ends in death."  
  
"Shut your mouth."  
  
"If you go North you'll be dead."  
  
"Better than burning corpses." Gendry said. "And you'll go too."  
  
Lem grunted, kept silent, and Gendry knew he was right. Lem stamped back up the stairs. In the darkness Brienne curled her long legs into her chest, watching Gendry with large, quiet eyes.  
  
He shut his eyes and felt the relief wash through his blood, every pore of skin, every nerve ending of his body. Three words were imprinted on his heart now, tatooed there forever: she is alive.

 


	3. Chapter three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter this time. I like scene setting, apparently.

[Gendry]

In his dream she is skipping stones along the river outside the Inn of the Kneeling Man. He doesn't know if it's a real memory or one he's made up, but in this dream she's happy. He's happy too. He feels the smooth white stone in his callused hands as she teases him. Don't throw it like thaaaaat, she says, and he tells her to shut up so he punches him square on the arm. It doesn't hurt much, but she's strong nonetheless. Silently they both think of their homes.  
  
He snaps himself awake to the grey eyes of Lady Stoneheart, observing him. He tries to fight the fear that runsthrough a body at her gaze. The silence stretches, brittle.  
  
"Mi-milady." He mumbles finally. "Is there anything I can-?"  
  
"My daughter." She says. The sound is choked, and settles dully on the floor.  
  
He kept still.  
  
"You were saying her name." She croaks out, hand constantly poised over her throat. "The younger one. The darker one."  
  
"Arya Stark?" He says, so quiet he's not sure she hears. He hasn't said her name in so long. It feels wrong, somehow. as if speaking her name out loud brings to life something ugly and terrible.  
  
"Yes." She says. "the little one. Underfoot. I had five children."  
  
Gendry looks at his hands. They've been become harder, older. There are scars there, white crescents and lines patterning the skin. Old, he realised. Hands that had cracked underneath the ice, beneath the world, where blood had flown, sticky between his fingers.  
  
"You will come with me to the North." She whispered.  
  
"I will." He swallowed.  
  
"But before that..." She said, hands coiled white in her lap. "I will watch that woman burn."  
  
"But...Sansa..."  
  
Lady Stoneheart rose her hand to silence him. Not for the first time Gendry noticed the way the skin shrunk around her knuckle bones, rippling.  
  
"The woman knows nothing." She rasped out. "Maybe...as the flames engulf her...she will give us an answer."  
  
She headed back towards the night.

 

[Arya]

 

The kitchen hums with activity. Her fingers feel sore from spending days plucking pheasants. around her the smells of intoxicating food— spices, wine, boiling meat. It is King Tommen’s name-day. This is the day Cersei will die, she decides. She imagines plucking off each golden strand of Cersei’s hair the way she was plucking these feathers. She'll scream until her throat will bleed, and she'll knot her hair in between her fingers, as taut as rope. She imagines a sharp pin pupil, the reflection she'll make in Cersei's eyes. It is almost arousing. She tries to concentrate on plucking out the blue feathers, to keep herself from shaking with exictement. She tries to remember her training, how they had tried to make her nothing more than a weapon, a metal.  
  
But metal had to be tempered before it could be forged. The heat and fire needed to be beaten out of it. And every kill was the blow of a hammer.

 


	4. Chapter four

[Gendry]

Gendry places his hand against the wall, feels the splintered wood. The rain had made the wood damp and it peels and curls beneath his palms. He squeezes his eyes shut until he sees white spots dancing. In the belly of the darkness he could hear her coughing. Brienne, the ugly one who called him Renly. He shook. Beside him Thoros shifts in his robes and Tom shivers from the cold.  
  
His feet carries him to where she lies. Tom lifts the torch to her face. What was it she saw in his face that gave her comfort? Something kind there? But he wasn't kind, not anymore. Yet her eyes still softened whenever she saw him, like they were dancing. It was that that stuck in him like a heated knife, the thought that she saw something good in him.  
  
Her eyes open. And then he can't stop.  
  
"No, no, this is wrong, this is wrong." Gendry says, choking out each word. "We can't do this."  
  
Thoros puts a hand on his shoulder. "Gendry, her Ladyship..."  
  
"No, this is wrong, I don't care what she says, it's wrong." He says. And it feels like he is going to be sick, and the flames smell of rancid flesh. And soon he can hear nothing but the blood rushing in his ears. Endless faces pass before him, faces of men he'd killed, men he'd help kill, men who he had fed to the flames as easy as he had thrown iron into the fire.  
  
"Boy...is...right..."  
  
 _I don't want to hurt you, but it's the right thing to do._  
  
"No...can't...won't..."  
  
He looks at his hands, and he could hear all the screams, bouncing off the walls. And Brienne watched him, fearful. But then it was Arya, Arya running away, the smell of the rain in his nostrils, and his fists cracking against the stone as he cried out her name.  
  
He pulls Brienne loose from her chains.

 

[Arya]

  
She finds the king playing with his cats.  
  
"Boots, Boots." He says. Arya remembers her time stalking cats at Syrio's command. in the back of her mind a sketchy memory of the king falling down clumsily in winterfell, the smacking of wooden sword against wooden sword, Bran's laughter. No she squeezes her eyes shut. I am nameless. I am faceless. Bran is a ghost that belongs to another ghost.  
  
"Tommen." Says a girl a little older than him, missing an ear and with a slit from her lip to the tip of her ear. She clutches a heavy belly. and for a second Arya thinks she is Cersei, but then a small, dying voice whispers the name Myrcella from that girl Arya's life so many years ago. Her last time in winterfell. Myrcella had followed that boy Robb with loving eyes, but this was no girl.  
  
"Mother wants to see you." Myrcella says. Tommen, this strange child-man, ignores her, instead twirling the cat's tail with his fingers. Myrcella sighs angrily and walks away in a swirl of velvet.  
  
Arya eyes squint as the boy potters around. Suddenly her chest tightens. Across the courtyard Rickon potters, a mere babe, laughing and gumming his fist. Robb follows his brother, trying to stop himfrom falling down the stairs, and in the distance she can hear Sansa gasp as Rickon pulls on the tail of a dog and the dog begins to growl, and then a peal of laughter cuts through the air. Her own.  
  
Arya corners herself against a wall and tries to breathe through the vice on her chest. That laughter, that laughter of that girl Arya hms in the air through the sound of the activity around her. it reverberates, tumbles back in on itself, again and again and again.  
  
She finds a dark corner, one where the voice of the wind covers up the sound of her breathing.


	5. Chapter five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions of rape

[Gendry]

  
He pushes Brienne underneath a hollow tree trunk to shield her from the rain. She squeaks from the pain in her limbs. Her wrists are so thin, like twigs. He wonders what it would take for them to snap. He rips off his cloak and wraps it around her.  
  
"By morning they'll have ridden out." Thoros says, shaking the water from his robes. "And they will find us."  
  
"I know." Gendry rests beside the oak, tries not to feel the cold. He hadn't even said goodbye to Jeyne, to Willow, to the children. Had just run, run with Thoros and the barely breathing corpse of a woman he had been unable to kill. Thoros tosses him a skin of sour wine. Gendry swallows a mouthful, wincing, but glad for the warmth that starts to burn down to his stomach.  
  
"Where will we go?" Thoros asks. He looks to Brienne, now sleeping underneath furs and gnarled roots, looking almost peaceful.  
  
"The Wall." Gendry said. He had already decided the moment he decided to rescue Brienne. Or from the moment he knew "she" was there. He wasn't sure which.  
  
"The Wall." Thoros repeated slowly, horrified. "Where the men are headed. Why?"  
  
Her name whispers in his ears again, and he tries to shake the noise away. " _My name's not Arry, it's Arya."_  
  
"The Wall forgives all crimes." Gendry said, standing up. He listened to the sound of rain around them. "And besides, they won't be looking to us going North, will they?"  
  
Thoros motioned towards the tree. "And what about her?"  
  
Gendry felt the chill on his skin then. He was responsible for her now.  
  
"She needs her strength, Gendry. She needs rest. Not a ride to the North."  
  
Gendry watched her, the faint movements of her breath stirring the limbs of her body. Did she even have a home? It made him uncomfortable to think like that, as her being something more than what he and the Brotherhood had deemed her.  
  
"We'll take her with us." Gendry says. "Find a Sept somewhere, or a boat. I couldn't let her die."  
  
Thoros said nothing, and Gendry hoped he understood, somehow, because he didn't feel he understood either. Hoped he understood he couldn't let her die. Couldn't let people die like that anymore, like they were nothing, because that meant that he was nothing too.  
  
He settled down beside the oak and shut his eyes, trying to dream of the Wall, but he dreamt of her instead. Her hands were covered in blue feathers and she smelt of raw meat and oil. But it wasn't her, it couldn't be. Arya was somewhere atop the Wall, skin blue from the chill, eyes trained anywhere but south.

 

[Arya]

  
One morning Myrcella came into the kitchen with her husband, the dark Dornish boy, to plan the birthing feast. Myrcella looks at her for the briefest of moments, and Arya sees nothing but ice in there, the resolve that has grown roots inside of her as well. She slices the knife down to the bone.

She overhears when she’s scrubbing potatoes the next day that Princess Myrcella is birthing her child. In her mind she imagines the fragile, thin hips of hers’ snapping from the strain. The cooks complain that it clashes too much with King Tommen’s name day. Their hands are tired and blistered and sore. They hate the Dornish-- the way the women swan in their silks, their stomachs rippled in the sunlight, twisted in gold. And soon scores of them would descend on king’s landing.  
  
Arya constantly tries to silence the laughter in her head. She hears the soft sound of Rickon’s footsteps, and Robb and Bran and Jon and Sansa and Mother and Father—  
  
I am nameless. I am faceless. Valar Morghulis.  
  
She’d have been married by now. Her name was, at least. A few men had tried to rape her but all were dead. With one man she sliced off his manhood with steel and she had never seen blood arc in such a way, against the blaze of the Braavosi sun. In the back of her mind the thought of blood makes Nymeria’s stomach grumble. She pads around in the forest, the light snow melting underneath her paws. Soon you’ll feed on queen, Arya thinks. Soon they both will.


	6. Chapter six

[Gendry]

They follow the river as best they can, their muscles constantly aching underneath the pelt of rain. They are too afraid to stop for long. In the rapid darkness of night the sound of the river is his friend. He remembers it well, the clay banks and muddy shores. It rains most days. He remembers that the moss meant he was going south and avoids it at all costs. He smiles a little. He had once teased her for that, but right now he thanks R'Hllor she went on about it all the time, otherwise he might not have remembered now.   
  
The quiet is unwelcoming. He is deep into Lannister land now, even if in name it is Frey. He tries as best he can to avoid the war. At the inn he muffled the gossip, the news. No one would disturb a smith, and that was all he was. The war was not important as long as he had food, shelter, and work. But it always found him.   
  
Sometimes he sees flashes of Lady Stoneheart's grey, mottled hands as she pressed the knife against his throat. Absentmindedly he brings his fingers to his neck, at the small crescent scar of the blade, clean and smooth. He wonders if the Lady Stoneheart really is dead. He dreamt the other night of those hands digging, more determined to kill him than ever. In the chaos all had been blood and shouts and screams and fire he hadn't really known what was going on  
  
She might be dead, and he might have killed her. The words sting and crawl around his chest. He imagines her face when he tells her of how he might have ended her Mother's life after he had sworn to serve her. But he tries to stop the possibilities in his mind extending too far. In the most vulnerable, tired edges of the night he imagines himself in cold blue armour, ice spraying from underneath the hooves of his horse and catching the sunlight as he charges up the Wall.  
  
And she is there, acorns laced through her hair. She smiles at him as if she were expecting him.   
  
Yet then the truth always settles on him in the morning, when the sunlight bites into his vision and he sees the world for what it is-- a world that would fail to shape itself around him, or around them.   
  
But still, he hoped.

 

[Arya]

  
Myrcella’s screams wind and twist away from Maegor’s Holdfast, where she has been for days. Arya can feel the horses of Dorne even from here. The servants chatter. The baby is dead, they tut, or a dwarf, or Sersei has strangled the child with its bloody cord. The sky overheard grows darker, purple, lightning colouring the groaning clouds. An ill omen, they mutter.  
  
It’s a Martell baby. The sun and the lion, yellow and yellow. Sometimes Arya sees Prince Trystane. He’s handsome but quiet, nervous almost. He’s no threat, not yet. He wears silk, even in the cold, and a heavy belt around his hip. Dornish swords wouldn’t stop her. No swords would stop her. She wonders if no one else sees it, sees the enemies appear and disappear.   
  
She thinks of Cersei, thin and lean and draped in shadow, listening to her daughter’s cries. She has to stop the face from becoming Catelyn Tully’s. And then the laughter begins again, but this is a different laughter. Now she is a little girl and Robb and Jon are twirling her in their arms and tickling her stomach. She feels lighter than air. She’ll have a new little brother soon. Good. She liked brothers more than she liked Sansa. Her brothers found her funny and let her crawl into bed with them when the wind howled against her window. Then the image cracks into a thousand shards as she reminds herself these are not her memories, not her life, mere things she has thieved from someone else, this girl Arya Stark.

She shut her eyes, pushes the brush along the kitchen floor, enjoying the strain on her muscles. I am nothing more than pain and the absence of it, she repeats to herself, light and darkness, nothing and everything.


	7. Chapter seven

[Gendry]   
  
In the air the constant spice of pine. They are all so tired. So tired. Maybe this is where he dies, he thinks. Icy winds blow and he finds shelter sometimes against the bark of old, reddened trees. He wishes he knew the land. All he remembers is the rule of moss. He feasts on roots, mushrooms, chestnuts. He gets used to hunger. Sometimes he remembers the time spent with Lommy and her grinding down bugs, feeling the grit coat his teeth.   
  
Brienne grows stronger, but still confused, calling him Renly and seeing every shadow as not just her enemy, but his. They come across the carcasses of thin horses with open stomachs. Wolves, Gendry thought, the wolf of the Riverlands.  More than once he had told the orpans bed time stories of the Riverlands Wolf to get them to sleep. He thinks of them, of Jeyne and Willow, and tries to ignore the pain of no goodbyes. Like Tobho, like his Mother, like--    
  
One night the winds are so strong he is crying, and the tears feel like they are going to freeze on his skin. He should take the Kingsroad, find an inn, make a better life, he reasons. But he feels the cold grasp of Lady Stoneheart's fingers on his neck at night and knows they will find him, somehow. At the Wall he will be at the edge of the world. He'll take a new name. He'll disappear. But one day Lady Stoneheart would find him.  
  
He traces the patterns of his helm, the grooves he worked into the steel himself so long ago, back when there was no war and his life was simple, before he met the little orphan girl/boy with the grey eyes. _She_ had always been so strong. He is no Bull, he thinks.  
  
He goes to sleep and wakes up with Brienne's dagger to his throat, flashing white in the moonlight.   
  
  
[Arya]  
  
  
She spends the next few days with Dornish spices filling her mind, her head, her dreams. There was a new baby boy, a prince.  The castle whirls with song-- the stinging harp of Dorne, the lilting flutes of Casterly Rock. And all Arya can think of is how frozen she feels, how easy it would be to slit Cersei’s throat amidst this chaos, to feel her warm blood flow through her fingers, but she can’t. Her breath hitches in her chest and all she can feel is fear.  
  
Nymeria grows restless, up there. At night she howls against the moon, a long cry for blood, for food, for a kill.  
  
Instead she prepares food. She becomes the nameless kitchen girl. Her hair becomes scented with grease and blood oranges. Maybe she should stay here, she thinks. Maybe Arya Stark really is dead. Maybe Winterfell had only ever been a dream.   
  
The only thing left to her was a prayer and a wolf.   
  
  
[Gendry]  
  
"Tell me why." She growls, straddling him. Gendry looks into her face and sees no fear there. She is the woman she used to be, the woman he had first met, the woman they had all done their best to destroy.   
  
He swallows, feels the blade keenly against his throat. "Because she told me to."   
  
She grits her teeth, growls more, draws blood. And he realises he isn't afraid, just numb. Death used to terrify him, set every nerve ending alight, but not now.   
  
"Coward, you craven." She says, and he realises she is crying.   
  
"I'm sorry."   
  
She moves closer to him, breath warming his face, teeth bared.   
  
"Where is Jaime?"   
  
"I don't know."   
  
"Liar." She spits.   
  
"I don't know. They never told me."   
  
"Liar." She presses the knife even closer to his neck, splitting open the old wound of Lady Stoneheart's scar, and Gendry shuts his eyes and sees her, laughing and spinning between the weirwoods as he prepares for death. I'm sorry I couldn't find you, he thinks. I'm sorry about so many different things, for not forging your brother's swords, for that and so much more.   
  
"Then I'll find him." She says.   
  
"You'll get killed."   
  
"I have honour, boy." She said. "I led Jaime to your people, I owe him his rescue." She narrows her eyes. "Where is Podrick?"   
  
He shuts his eyes. He remembers his face: the messy dark hair and frightened eyes, the way his voice sounded in the dark. Please, please, please. I'm sorry, Gendry tells himself, but he still slips the rope around Podrick's neck, and only hesitates only slightly before kicking the chair from underneath him.   
  
"I killed him." He says. "They told me to kill him so I killed him."   
  
She starts to scratch at him, to claw his face and he finds himself lying there, thinking of that boy and how he'd soiled his clothes and how he'd begged, how he'd begged and how the words didn't touch him, just deflected off him like a shield. She hits his chest, winding him, fists pumelling away, before Thoros wakes up and drags her sobbing off of him. In the morning she is gone. He feels the new scar on his neck she has made and is grateful for it.   
  
  
[Arya]  
  
The baby they named Oberyn--  slap in Cersei Lannister’s face, she overhears some cooks saying. Not to mention the fact that the princess had stopped the Queen from entering her chamber. Instead Arianne Martell was in there, cooing the baby to sleep and pouring Myrcella her dreamwine. Cersei instead paces in the sept, as hard and silent as the marble. She prays to the Stranger whilst the court place candles at the feet of the Mother for baby Oberyn. They say she has lost her mind  
  
It is then that arya decides.  
  
It is a simple kitchen blade. The steel presses against her stomach,  a welcome sensation, like that handsome sailor boy who she lost it all to with hands rough but warm, eager. One swipe is all it will take. The Sept is empty. She enters as a Silent Sister, dedcated to the Stranger, to death. Valar morghulis. Everyone must die.   
  
But when she arrives Cersei Lannister is already dead.


	8. Chapter eight

[Gendry]  
  
They make it to the Green Fork and Thoros tells him of the battle they had here, of the dead Lannister and Stark men who are buried below. Gendry thinks of all the battles that have happened, and how he has managed to survive this far. The land around him is beautiful-- winter doesn't seem to have reached here yet. The snap of the wind against the tree branches is all that is beginning to show.   
  
Thoros dresses in rags to avoid being recognised. Here they are Thetos and his assistant Brint. They stop off at villages, begging or stealing food where they can. At night Thoros watches the flames, transfixed, trying to see the stag in the Weirwood again, but to no avail. Instead he sees snatches, fragments, shadows. Gendry shuts his eyes and tries to imagine the Wall. He hoped they'd let him smith. He wondered what it looked like-- maybe he'd see wolves there, and bone-white Weirwood trees with blood-red faces that would stare into him like she had once described.   
  
"Could you ask the fire where we could get some food?" Gendry jokes one day. Thoros doesn't answer, simply stares ever deeper into the flames. Probably looking for that stupid vision again, he thought. Gendry shut his eyes and began to massage one of the bruises Brienne had left him.  
  
He would not mind dying by her hand, he thinks, if Brienne should . It is better than starving. They had a few starvers come by the inn once, with cheeks as sharp as knife edges and sunken, dark eyes. The children had had nightmares long after they had left. They would complain of the glassy eyes following them in the dark, choking out calls for bread, thin hands scratching at their doors. And then Gendry would pretend he didn't have nightmares too, that he was strong and not just a green boy and not just as scared as they were.   
  
He tries to conjur up the children's faces, the constellations of freckles, the bony knees, but they all seem to become him. He is six years old and wandering the streets. The sun scorches his skin. He's hungry and dirty and lowly, he knows, from the way the lords and ladies look at him with that strange mixture of attraction and aversion towards the unknown. The King's procession passes, and with it the scent of unknown fruits and spices, ribbons of brightly dyed colours and men in ornate armour. The sun casts off their metal and the light pierces into his eyes. And that same emptiness that to link it all together, giving his life constancy-- hunger.

 

/

 

[Arya]  
  
The blood had made a slash across the Mother’s face. Mother’s blood on the Mother, she thinks. It is bad luck. The Septas scrub the white marble whilst she and other Silent Sisters crowd around her body, shielding it from greedy eyes. Arya has seen many types of death-- this is a clean one but still somehow jagged around the edges, hateful.   
  
People outside clamour with their prayers. ‘Justice’ Arya can hear when she inserts herself into the crowd, slipping on another face. ‘Whore’, another ‘the Father judges wisely’, and even ‘praise R’hllor!’. Arya watched with her whole body. She tastes the scent of blood in the air. She spots a little girl crouching by Baelor's statue, dark and wary, and knows she is not real, but her all those years ago, the old her, watching the crowd with her breath stilled in her chest.   
  
Look how the Sept is befouled, she heard a woman say, it is a sign of the Red God’s anger  
  
And another, 'it was one of ‘em Red priests, trying to defy the Mother and spoil our temple’  
  
It was neither, she knew, but both. It was the god of death, the god of many-faces, but she hadn’t been his messenger.


	9. Chapter nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I am still alive. Sorry about the irregular updates.

[Gendry]

They meet hordes of begging brothers on the road, flanked by Poor Fellows. The men clang their flint bowls, murmur low chants. They carry bones- bones of murdered old Septons and Septas, Silent Sisters and the like. Muddied men, women and children follow, some crying, begging for forgiveness from the Father.   
  
Gendry feels a shiver when the Warrior's Men eye him and feels glad Thoros doesn't don his red robes. Later on he scoffs, "Little sparrows, Bull. Nothing to be afraid of."   
  
But they both knew they should be afraid. Words ran like wind and they knew how the Faith Militant had spread and how the faith of the Red God was spreading too. Clashes had taken place in cities, with Red Temples and Septs alike sacked, with whispers of Septons and Septas being sacrified to the fire in order to quell the Winter's approach. Stannis Baratheon now held the North with a red woman who birthed shadows and wore a ruby around her neck. Statues of the Mother there were mutilated, fed to the fire.   
  
Thetos and Brint make chatter with the sparrows.   
  
"We are on our way to populate the north with the temples of the seven." An old, hard-faced brother spits. "To crush this Red God and the Old Gods." He hunched over his donkey. "This was has been a curse from the Father, for our acceptance of their wild ways. The High Septon says as much. The time for toleration is over. We need to spread the word of the true faith."   
  
Later on Gendry wonders if the old man was right, if this was a punishment. but Thoros grumbles, "In Braavos you will find a temple for every faith, and no discord. And it does not burn like Winterfell or the Blackfyre either." But Gendry thinks it might burn soon. He had seen the charred skeletons of Septs, of his inn, of trees, so why not some place he had never heard of?   
  
They fall in line with the brothers, taking part in their prayers. There are men incased in brilliant armour of crystal and capes fluttering handsomely in the wind. It is all Gendry can do to look at the thin, itchy robes of the Begging Brothers and not laugh.   
  
/  
  
[Arya]  
  
  
The sparrows emerge, stinking of boiled leather and piss. Arya counts the swords. She begins to lose sight of where the population of King’s Landing ends and the sparrows begin.   
  
Cersei’s body is barely out of the castle for five minutes before the shouts begin. Women shriek. The fire swirls. Arya finds Needle, feels it pressing against her thigh, comforting. Dust flares into her nostrils. Blood- she can smell the promise of it in the air. Yhen the red people emerge, cloaked in scarlet, the fire worshippers. She remembers the fires at Braavos. They have come to send the false queen to their Red God, they shout. Men brandish rusted swords. They’re hungry, arya notices, watching their thin legs. Hunger was the most dangerous thing.  
  
Cersei is draped in a lion’s cloak, flanked by a column of Lannisters and Tyrells and Martells and whoever. Arya edges up to a roof to watch the goings on below, silent and invisible. Then the fires and shouts start, a great push towards the coffin, and even though the Kingsguard slash and cut down all they can, soon Cersei’s corpse  is in the crowd. People scream and scratch at her, pulling out tufts of her hair, hacking at her face with their nails. They are hungry, so hungry.   
  
In the distance Nymeria chases along a river she remembers from long ago.   
  
  



	10. Chapter ten

[Gendry]

They come across an old, nameless village when they learn the queen is dead. They eat silently by the fire of an inn. People sing rude songs of the queen. Pilgrims mutter that it is a sign of displeasure from the Mother-- for her to die so soon after the arrival Myrcella's babe, in front of the eyes of the Mother. "Her children were born from incest," an old drunk Septa blubbered, "and now the Father has judged her" 

That night on the hard inn bed he thinks of his own mother- the grunts as she brought men to his bed, her dirty blonde hair, and then when the grey plague took her. Gendry had watched as the Silent Sisters tended her body. He remembered trying to hold back tears as he watched vigil for her. She looked beautiful in the candlelight, warm and welcoming, though all he really remembers of those early years was hunger and soiled clothes, the smell of ale and urine mingling together. 

The next day a man led him to Iron Street. Torbo didn't explain anything. Gendry was scared, but at least now he had clean clothes and a bed and food, and he liked working with his hands and he was good at it. He was going to be a smith like Torbo and make swords and armour for knights and kings. 

And then one day it was ripped away from him, as sudden as a crack of thunder. He had been a good apprentice, he knew. Torbo had never complained. Gendry didn't drink or whore and kept quiet. Torbo had just murmured something about him having to go. 

He shuts his eyes and tries to remember it but can't, because whenever he tries to think of anything happy eventually all he can see is Podrick's face. 

/

[Arya]

She sticks close to Baelor’s Sept, listening to the hushed whispers and murmurs of the sparrows. Around them the Kingsguard loops, the sky grey and overcast. Winter is— no. A raindrop splashes on her cheek, icy cold.

Cersei is tied naked and mutilated to the statue of Baelor, the Seven Pointed Star cut into her torso. She looks like a helm from a ship. And she wanted to feel glad, to feel happy at the sight of her, but couldn’t. How sad and limp she was there- this wasn’t the Cersei she knew, the Cersei she hated. 

The Kingsguard were trying to push through, to retrieve the queen regent’s body, but the crowd was so numerous there was no chance. They moved like the sea, as if they were waves pulling back and forth. Then when the first Sparrow fell to the sword the crowd seemed to scream as one, broken swords and axes brandishing themselves in the air. Arya studied the sight from the roof, before skimming, silent and invisible, down the building.

“That bitch deserved to die.”

“She disgraced the Mother”

“King Tommen is an afront to the Seven, he was born of incest”

“Cersei mated with the red demon!”

The High Septon stood on the steps, shucking oysters and passing them out red raw and bloody to his followers, watching with cool eyes what was beginning. The Gold Cloaks stood at the perimeter, trying their best to keep the Sparrows in the square, but it was war now. Arya watched young boys slain, women screaming and begging for justice. Soon the Warrior’s Sons emerged, fronted by a young man with shock-white hair and a thin face. Arya’s breath quickened as she saw the silver flash of swords.

A man with a golden hand was fighting the thin white-haired man, trying his best as the Sparrows hacked at his horse. Eventually he tumbled into the crowd, drowning in a sea of claws.

And then she saw Ilyn, almost five years exactly after he had slain Eddard Stark in this very place, befouling the sacred with wolf’s blood. 

He was hacking away, trying desperately to clear a route. She grasped Needle and wrestled her way through the crowd. Sparrows fluttered at his cheeks, barely touching him. Arya fought against the monstrous shape of limbs and swords, shouts and screams. Only when she was pressed firmly against him did she find needle and pierce through his mail, to his heart, and made it stop beating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, in this universe Jaime and Ilyn have ended up back in King's Landing and are part of the Kingsguard again. This is (probably? eventually?) not going to be canon, but hey ho, that's not what you're here for anyway.


	11. Chapter eleven

[Gendry]   
  
Thoros sees it in the fire- the breastless queen, flayed and displayed on Baelor's Sept, her cunt slit up to her collarbone.   
  
Gendry shivers. Sparrows, red priests, outcasts... Gendry longs for the Wall, the constancy of it. Thoros grows quiet. They trudge along the road, saying nothing as they walk the endless banks of the Green Fork. They chance upon some Begging Brothers preaching about the red devils Stannis keeps aflame in the North, and the demonic trees the Northmen worship as they feast on flesh. Gendry sees Thoros' eyes harden, but is glad when he carries on walking, silent.   
  
He remembers High Heart, counting trees with Arya and laughing. She had told him how they worshipped the bone-white trees. She had seemed sad to see them all cut down. He was fairly sure Northmen didn't feed on flesh, but nowadays people seemed to spit and their words sizzle as they spoke of Northmen; heathen animals, who change shape and light fires and would eat and rape every Southerner given half the chance.   
  
For a moment he thinks of Arya, up there in the cold, but instead shuts his eyes and fights the thought. The day he found out she had married the Bolton bastard he had locked himself away in the forge, refusing food and sleep for three days, instead hammering endlessly away at the steel, willing the anger and the guilt to leave his body, become something real. He imagined rescuing arya with the sword he created, drenching Ramsay Bolton in his own blood.   
  
But she was rescued now.   
  
  
/   
  
[Arya]  
  
She is about to leave King's Landing through the King's Gate when they storm in. For a while all she can see is the coloured silks. She falls to the floor, breathless from the rush. She craned up and saw the bronze sun, and in a distant corner of her mind she hears the voice of an old teacher. Martell. She thinks of the baby in Maegor's Holdfast, the Queen slumped on the marble floor, and it all knits together in a perfect tapestry. For the briefest of moments she hates herself for not seeing it, before leaping to her feet and watching the scene with the eyes of a soldier.   
  
They are a numerous and well-armed army, and will have no trouble taking the Red Keep. Arya would have bet that there were Martell men inside as well. She remembers the look in Myrcella's eyes that day in the kitchen.   
  
She decides to make for the Mud Gate. In the distance she hears screams and swords and feels the comforting press of Needle on her skin. She arrives at Fishmonger's Square, repeating the words they taught her in the House of Black and White to anchor her, but her fear comes up in a retch when she spots the Sparrows.   
  
/  
  
[Gendry]   
  
They reach Hags Mire with the band of Begging Brothers. Gendry spends most of the night by the fire, only breaking to eat. Around him men sullenly drink their watered wine, breaking occassionally to laugh in jest at the Queen's death. Gendry tries to imagine her there, tied to Baelor's statue, her back arched towards the darkened sky. The woman who had tried to kill him. He bit into an onion floating at the bottom of his soup. He wondered why he never sought answers. He supposed he had just wanted to live, when you keep running there isn't much time to think, only to keep forward, always.   
  
"What was she like?" Gendry asks. Thoros looks to him, confused. Gendry coughs, suddenly embarassed. "The queen, I mean."   
  
"Oh." Thoros said. "A haughty thing. Like ice. Despised me, I'm sure." His eyes looked to Gendry again, sharp and searching. "Why do you ask?"   
  
Gendry doesn't answer, instead carefully listening to the words being tossed around in the inn. There are rumours floating about, rumours of flayed men pinned to the withered old Heart Trees, of Northmen with sharpened teeth and claws. Gendry tries to take no notice, focussing only on what is ahead, on the Wall. But then the door of the inn creaked open with an almost anguished moan, and all at once the inn was filled with soldiers. Frey men, he supposes, but Gendry feels too tired to fear them.   
  
"We need strong men!" A fat one bellowed. "Men to fight for the North."   
  
"We fight for the Seven." The man who replied was a broad, stocky man with a scar that ripped open half his face. He led most of the men and was taller even than Gendry. He positioned himself in front of the soldier. "We are headed to the North to burn down the demon trees and spread the word of the Seven."   
  
There was a still, taut silence. Gendry felt the muscles in his hand twitch, the sound of the heartbeat thrum through his ears. Fight, fight.   
  
The soldier laughs, his whole body shaking. He spits in the floor. "That's what I think of your Seven." Then Gendry saw the faded sigil on his breast-- a flayed man stretched across the man's chest.   
  
/  
  
[Arya]   
  
She wonders if anyone even knows why they are fighting. Maybe people had in fact forgotten a long time ago. Maybe death was all anyone understood anymore. But no, she understood surviving. She tried her best to wrestle her way out of the crowd, but soon someone had punched her in the stomach, her hair tearing as endless hands grabbed-- hands to steady themselves, hands to destroy others, endless hands becoming a monster she could not fight.   
  
Soon all the breath was squeezed out of her body and it was all she could do to keep her eyes focussed on the sky, and then in one shattering moment she realised she was Arya Stark again, because at once she was nine years old and Father was dead, and there were birds in the sky just like then, and then she could taste salt on her tongue because she was crying, screaming into the cacophony of the crowd because the pain was pouring out of her like poison.   
  
She blacks out.   
  
/   
  
[Gendry]   
  
He helped to tie the prisoners together. The ropes creaked as they bit into the wrists of the Begging Brothers. Thoros grunted and took another swig of wine and helped to tie the rope onto the back of the cart. The Stout men jeered as people fought to steady themselves, whilst some clasped Gendry on the soldier and called him 'good lad' again and again, their breath misting in the cold.   
  
It was only when he went for a piss that Thoros found him, pushed him to the ground, eyes alive and furious.   
  
"Have you lost your mind?!" He shook. "These men are savages."   
  
All men are savages, Gendry thought. "They're better equipped, better manned, and they'll get us to the North quicker." . Gendry said, voice flat.   
  
Thoros stood back, his eyes frightened, as if seeing Gendry for the first time, and not a green boy with hopes of knighthood and victory, but an animal who would gnaw on the bones of a friend to live. But then something in his stance changed, and he instead saw the truth lying there ever so faintly behind the boy who inhabitated the body of a man.   
  
"You're not telling me the whole truth." Thoros said. "I risked my life for you. Tell me the truth. Tell me why you helped the Northmen overpower the Sparrows."   
  
Gendry tilted his jaw upwards, trying to look a man, the Bull he used to be and wished he was. He wouldn't relent, he decided, I am a man and I was a boy then and she was just a stupid girl.   
  
"She's gone, Gendry." Thoros said, his voice so low it was almost carried off with the wind. "Don't seek vengeance. Don't become the men we stopped being when we left."   
  
He hurt her. He hurt her. He hurt her. And he had let him hurt her. And now he would bring her his head  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying to make the chapters longer now, hope it works out to a better reading experience.


End file.
